In my very first message on this subject I stated (in their
definition) that snippets were "usually unmodifiable." I gave
specific examples whose modifiability is easy enough to determine:
$ head -7 /usr/share/emacs/21.2/etc/GNU
Copyright (C) 1985, 1993 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim copies
of this document, in any medium, provided that the copyright notice and
permission notice are preserved, and that the distributor grants the
recipient permission for further redistribution as permitted by this
notice.
$ tail -4 /usr/share/emacs/21.2/etc/LINUX-GNU
Copyright 1996 Richard Stallman
Verbatim copying and redistribution is permitted
without royalty as long as this notice is preserved.
On the length-scale of GNU Emacs, these certainly satisfy the "small"
snippet requirement! Without including any ancillary emacs packages,
or counting GCC and friends, or counting all of Debian since after all
without these documents none of Debian would exist, we have ...
$ apt-cache show emacs21| egrep '^Size:'
Size: 12888244
$ stat --format="Size: %s" /usr/share/emacs/21.2/etc/{,LINUX-}GNU
Size: 26334
Size: 5870
(26334+5870)/12888244 = 0.0025
Actually I do think they are misplaced, and would be better housed in
/usr/share/doc/emacs21/.
About the "README" offer you allude to, do you really think an
upstream author's statement:
Copyright blah blah blah ...
Distributed under the GNU GPL v2 ...
Source licenses for inclusion of this code in proprietary programs
are available from the author for $10,000 plus 2% of gross sales.
is modifiable? Removable sure. Maybe appendable. But modifiable?
How can it be changed? Do you think Debian could just change the 2%
to a 0.5%? Maybe give a discount to non-profits? When we talk about
code being modifiable, that's what we mean: the ability to change it
in arbitrary ways. Here, no changes are in fact possible, however you
read the license and such.